Empty nesters... financial impact of kids leaving?

[Anonymous]

I'm curious how much your day to day expenses changed after your kids were fully launched. I know the college years are still expensive, but after that?

I'm trying to get a better sense of what my budget might look like in retirement. It feels impossible to disentangle the money I spend on my kids with the money that my husband and I would still spend when they leave.

Did everything go down across the board? Was it actually not a big change at all? Thanks for any insight!

[Anonymous]

Food, car insurance, eventually health insurance, cell phone. Op, you can pay for as much or as little, once they are adults, as you like. I think the college years were more about the young adults occasionally asking for help, financially.

[Anonymous]

My Dad claimed that their water bill went down 1/3 when I left the house. We were a family of four.

[Anonymous]

My inlaws actually tracked this. Their food budget went down by half when DH left for college and he still had a sibling at home.

[Anonymous]

To be honest our food budget hasn’t gone down because with a kid here we made an effort to cook meals but with just two of us we’ve made more use of meal deliveries etc.

It’s cheaper for all of us to have a family cell plan so I don’t expect to kick them off that.

[Anonymous]

Food mostly, although we started eating out a little more, so no real savings there. We got rid of one car which also lowered costs. That’s really it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My Dad claimed that their water bill went down 1/3 when I left the house. We were a family of four.

This is true. My water bill has gone down signficantly since my kids moved out but water is so cheap.

[Anonymous]

Also interested in this.

We are extremely young parents by DCUM standards and should be empty nesters by 47yo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also interested in this.

We are extremely young parents by DCUM standards and should be empty nesters by 47yo.

Extremely young?

[Anonymous]

Car insurance, school and sports fees, some vacations with just 2 of us, food, clothing and personal care items. Not sure what the total is but definitely lower.

But…we still do some family vacations, and now have added an in law to the mix. Both kids spend a lot of time at our summer home and expenses go up then. And we usually pay for airfare for kids to come home for holidays and one of them lives far away. So net is probably not much different, but a lot of that is our choice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also interested in this.

We are extremely young parents by DCUM standards and should be empty nesters by 47yo.

Extremely young?

NP - If you're talking about kids graduated form college and self-supporting, then yeah, extremely young. That happens when kids are 22 at the earliest (assuming 4 years of college), so the PP was 25 when her *youngest* kid was born. In DCUMland, that's very young.

[Anonymous]

For us the biggest impact is not living expenses but the lack of the need to save for college any more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also interested in this.

We are extremely young parents by DCUM standards and should be empty nesters by 47yo.

Extremely young?

PP here. Most of our friends have 2-10yos and our youngest will be 20 this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My Dad claimed that their water bill went down 1/3 when I left the house. We were a family of four.

We live in an area where water is crazy expensive (as in 150% increase over our previous city). I joke that when the recent grad heads to school ours will drop $100/month. As that teen likes to take 90 min showers....no clue how there is even any hot water left when they are finished. But I'm actually not joking, Ill likely see that decrease

[Anonymous]

Our youngest of four is now 31 and married with a kid. So they've been launched for a while. We married young and retired young -- right after the youngest finished college.

Many day to day expenses (food, entertainment, utility bills, etc.) are considerably lower. So is health insurance since we no longer have a family plan. We still have a family plan for the phones but the "kids" all pitch in their share. Cable/internet/streaming services are largely the same, although we do share passwords with kids and they pay for some of these.

There are other expenses that we have incurred on behalf of the kids post-launch that you might not wish to. We've paid for nearly 100 percent of three weddings, helped two of our kids with down payments, and bought a house as an investment property for a third kid to live in. And we just booked a vacation condo for three weeks for close to $20k for the whole family to come and go consistent with their schedules. We only do this stuff because we want to though.